Creation and disclosure of personal home pages has become common with the spread of Internet technologies in recent years. On the other hand, most computer users create files, documents, and reports by means of presentation software or the like without a connection to a public network such as the Internet and use document files created in the home or in the office.
In general, a Web page or a document file (hereinafter, referred to as “document file”) is often composed of several types of files. For example, a Web page including a photograph as a document file is composed of three types of files: a file of the Web page, an image file of the photograph taken by a digital camera or the like and an image file of special effect characters for use in explaining the foregoing image file.
Software products for creating a Web page or a document file (hereinafter referred to as “document file”) are widely available. For designing an entire document file, however, the software often requires a creator to have a certain expertise.
For example, factors in determining the general effect (hereinafter, referred to as “tone” from time to time) in the design of a document file are “the entire or partial layout of the document file,” “color tones of the entire or individual contents of the document file,” “a display method of links (index of related files that can be displayed),” “types of fonts (including graphically represented character types in addition to document fonts)” or the like. In general, a user adjusts at least one of these four factors to modify the design.
To adjust these factors, however, the user needs expertise in a plurality of areas since the adjustment requires a knowledge of how to use software used for individual factors or of how to edit the document file (in the case of a Web page, tag specifications in Hyper document Markup Language (HTML) or the like).
Granted that the user knows how to adjust the individual factors, he or she has to make individual works for the respective factors to adjust the document file. Therefore, after a fine adjustment for one factor, the user need to make an adjustment suitable for the fine adjustment for another factor and further an adjustment with consideration of the total harmonious balance.
For example, to change a color tone of an entire Web page, the user needs to find a location where the color tone of the entire Web page is specified from an HTML tag and to specify an appropriate color tone at an appropriate location on the assumption that the specification of the color tone generates an ideal color tone the user wants.
Moreover, to change the color tone of an image used in a part of the Web page (for example, a raster image referred to as a bitmap image), the user has to be able to use dedicated software for changing the color tone of the image. Thus, the software requires the user to have a specialized knowledge in independent and individual areas to adjust some of the above four factors.
Furthermore, these adjustments are made individually for each factor, and therefore it is impossible to adjust all of the factors simultaneously. Specifically, if a user changes the color tone of an image in a part of the Web page to a brighter one and further changes the color tone of the entire Web to a brighter color tone suitable for the foregoing, the degree of the former adjustment in brightness often finely differs from the degree of the latter adjustment in brightness, and therefore the user needs to make adjustments of both repeatedly.
As a conventional method of changing a general effect of a Web page without expertise, there is already known a method of changing a Web page by using a design template previously created by a designer or the like. Software for creating a Web page is provided with styles, which determine the general effect (soft, simple, natural, and the like and their subordinate concepts), so that a user selects one of the general effects for the Web page by means of the styles.
While a user can create a Web page by selecting a template suitable for the general effect of the entire Web page out of the prepared templates, the template approach cannot be used where the entire Web page has already been created. Specifically, it is impossible to adjust the general effect (color tone, font, or the like) once the layout has been completed with the contents constituting parts of the Web page (images or fonts arranged in the Web page or the like) arranged. Furthermore, it is impossible to change the effects of the contents constituting the parts of the Web page simultaneously with the adjustment of the general effect of the Web page.
Generally, a user sometimes wants to change the general effect (tone) of a document file created on a trial basis (or a document file created once). Specifically, the user sometimes wants to finely adjust the general tone of the document file (wants to make the color tone brighter or to change the document file into “Japanese style”) using the same contents.
For these fine adjustments, the user similarly needs to make fine adjustments of the contents constituting the parts of the document file (images or fonts arranged in the document file) in addition to the adjustments of the file that is a base of the document file as stated above.
To resolve this problem, there is a known method of storing the entire document file as an image (a raster image referred to as a bitmap image) and adjusting, for example, a color tone or contrast by means of image processing software. In using this method, however, the file processed by means of the image processing software can be quite large, slowing up the image processing operations. Moreover, a file created in this manner is an image file and thus cannot be edited as a text file.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a document editing method, a program for executing the document editing method, and a document editing system, each of which enables creating a harmonious document file at a time and easily without individually working on a plurality of factors characterizing the general effect (tone) of a document file.